Of Highest Birth
by wanda von dunayev
Summary: To you fall both the glory and the blame.


**Of Highest Birth**

To you fall both the glory and the blame.

Warnings: Spoilers for 5.1.

* * *

Rommath is a true son of Silvermoon, with the delicate cat's face and diamond eyes the poets love to praise. He perceives himself as beautiful beyond a mortal beauty, and there are few who would speak him wrong. Yet he has spent all his life among humans.

It's true: most of his friends are quel'dorei, high-born lords and ladies, and he will never not speak Common with an accent. One day he will go back to Quel'Thalas, take up his father's lands, find a wife to bear him elven children, settle down. But he still thinks of Dalaran as home, catches himself calling it that sometimes though he knows he should not. _Home_. Home where it snows in the winter; home where stray dogs roam through the street, howling; home where Kael'thas Sunstrider, the future king, reigns eternal-though he, too, was born in Quel'Thalas.

Rommath has never not perceived that humans can also be beautiful.

He has never not compared himself with them.

His pride in his race is prickly, touchy, overstated. It lacks the casual grace of those still in his homeland.

He is an outsider, born within. He feels this on his skin, in his eyes, an immutable characteristic of his person that both elates and frightens him. It is a blessing, of course, to be special-but sometimes he would like to be a little _less_ special.

He forgets it sometimes, but humans do not forget. They remind him when he least expects it, catching him off guard. A sly look. A whisper. A stare.

But for a long while, he is allowed to not remember.

* * *

Rommath thought he was a true son of Dalaran. He thought wrongly.

He left it in flames behind him as Kael'thas led them from their prisons, toppled columns and collapsed walls. When he steps into this new nightmare world-_Outland_, they call it, out beyond the limits of any possible experience-rain sears his skin like acid, and he lifts his head, blinded by blood from a gash on his forehead.

_Traitor_ men called him, and they locked him away in the bowels of the city, and bound his arms in cold iron shackles. When they whipped him he said the names of his human friends like a litany, a ward against doubt, the archmagi who flattered him and praised him and bedded him, the ones he called his allies and lovers and friends: Modera, Ansirem, Arugal, Vargoth, Antonidas.

They did not come to his cell. When the cold winds rose and Garithos sent all Prince Kael'thas's sorcerers to die, the humans closed ranks, closed him out. He sees the depths of his idiocy now, reflected back at him in the desolation of this dying world. He never had a place there. They lied to him, those human lords, and he, pleased and stupid, lied to himself. He is a son of alien people, now and forever.

"We will make a new home here," Prince Kael'thas-King Kael'thas now, he tells himself-says.

But he has had too many homes. He thought this was a blessing, a bounty, that he could weigh them all and consider them his riches. He sees now that all his titles and his wealth and his glory were weak insurance against the day when he would have to choose.

* * *

Rommath is the greatest of lords, raised high, and he knows that there can be no return. He has survived Silvermoon's fall, Dalaran's sack, his king's betrayal. He has emerged from the chaos unbloodied, if not precisely unscathed.

He alone sees clearly. The elders are all dead; he takes their place, though he is only just past middle age. His is the wisdom they should bow to, his the voice of truth in Quel'Thalas. But there are many who do not want to hear it. They dream of better days, a glorious past reclaimed, a friendship with humans and a moral innocence lost forever.

He tries to dissuade them, gently, then not gently (his patience with foolishness is famously short).

He says, "Listen to me. Who knows the treachery of humans better than I?"

He says, "They will only lie and deceive you. You are nothing to them, a thing to be used up and cast aside."

He says, "You are fools and bloody fools. Hang yourselves, but don't think to bring the rest of us with you."

Some of them listen, but not enough. They yield to violet, these children: violet robes and violet tabards, violet standards and violet banners, violet walls and violet towers, and over it all, triumphant, that violet all-seeing gimlet eye.

Rommath would like to spit in it.

One day, he vows, but it is a hollow oath. The ones he hates are forever beyond his reach. He says their names again, a promise: Modera, Ansirem, Arugal, Vargoth, Antonidas. Dead, shamed, or triumphant. He will go to his grave with vengeance unsatisfied, and it is enough to make him want to scream and scream and tear his hair: he, who has the face of a doll or a demon or an animal, he of knife-sharp elven beauty.

* * *

His return to Dalaran is furtive, when it comes. He sneaks below the streets he once strode so proudly, so certain of his power and place in the world. It is all too familiar: the prisons, the terror, the flight. But now it is others who are captive, and he who must play the savior.

In Stormwind this will be called an Alliance victory. They will say justice has been done this day. _Their_ justice. No justice.

He is filthy from the sewers, sodden and stinking, watching as the Horde's champion cuts through Silver Covenant men with the casual efficiency of a butcher. The edge of her spear is wet with the blood of Rommath's people. He, too, is a son of necessity.


End file.
